Advice on Heating Up Your Car in Cold Months

When temperatures drop significantly during winter months, most people spend some time in the morning warming up their car before getting in.

Many people warm up their engines prior to driving in colder months but doing so might not come with the benefits that most people think.

Cars that have been built after the nineties are being built using a fuel injection method which has gotten rid of the “carburetor,” the part of the car that combines air and fuel. For cars with carburetors, a car had to remain idle before driving in order to work but that isn’t the case for most modern cars.

Warming up your car on idle during cold months could actually decrease engine life, not increase it, which is what many people believe it does. Gas typically doesn’t evaporate in a cold engine and engines built with fuel injection are designed to pump more gas which means that you don’t really need to warm up your engine in order to get it working.

Keeping your car on idle can potentially damage your engine, spark plus, cylinders, and more. Leaving a cold engine on idle will likely waste fuel and result in a surplus of fuel residue which can affect engine performance and mileage.

With that being said you can’t get into your car when it’s freezing and take off at top speed without damaging your vehicle. It is still important to give your engine some time to adjust to colder temperatures which means driving slowly and allowing the engine to warm up and oil to circulate.